The other night I had a hard time getting to sleep. Somewhere in my mental meandering I thought about the terms mister and misses and came up with the more accurate terms mister and mystery, followed by masculine and femi-none or femi-nun and male and fee-male. But then, even in my semi-asleep state, I was being a chauvinist pig, wasn't I?
Another thought I had, after working on jigsaw puzzles, was that a painter could paint a landscape, have it affixed to a magnetic sheet that could be cut into jigsaw pieces, have part of the pieces magnetically attached to a framed metal plate with the other pieces on a table beneath the hanging picture. People at the gallery could try their hands at finding pieces that fit. The painting could be called “Work in Progress.”
I was thinking about a mother dove I'd once seen in our backyard. She had a nest in one of our orange trees with two babies and once when I was out there and too close she took off and gave me that injured bird bit, where she fluttered across the ground looking for all the world like really easy prey. And that led me to consider where and how that behavior got started. I know all about instinct and how it’s knowledge passed on genetically. But there would also have to be some kind of avian reasoning going on at one time or another. Sometime in the past, a dove must have seen another dove, actually injured, and doing an excellent although unwitting job of luring a predator away from her young. And the light went on over his/her head. “Ah ha! What a good idea. I could fake it and accomplish the same thing.” And thus was born the acting job that became instinctive in the breed. But it first had to involve some reasoning. A little bird brain that could put one and one together. Granted, he wasn’t yet up to putting 1309 and 1246 together. But that could come generations and generations later. Just as it must have with humans.
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